Grow Fast, Do Good: Amazon’s Kara Hurst on Turning Sustainability Into an Edge

Kara Hurst (0:00)

I think stepping up and saying, hey, we tried this, it worked, it didn't work. Share one success, share one failure, and everybody does that, you're gonna learn 10 things in a day. And I think that moves the world forward much quicker than anything else.

Dan Bova (0:16)

Hey, everyone, welcome to a special episode of How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com. Today's bonus episode of How Success Happens is brought to you by Amazon. So, I always ask guests on the show to define what the word success means to them.

Kara Hurst is Amazon's chief sustainability officer. And for over a decade, she's been leading worldwide teams working on environmental sustainability, human rights, and social and community impact. So we're going to pick her brain to find out what strategies she's put into place to help Amazon grow responsibly that you can apply to your business. Welcome, Kara.

Kara Hurst (1:19)

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation.

Dan Bova (1:22)

Yeah, great to talk to you. So let me, chief sustainability officer, you know, that word, sustainability, means something different to everyone. So I thought we could start off. What is your working definition?

Kara Hurst (1:35)

Yeah, sustainability can mean a lot of different things to people, I think, for Amazon, and for me personally, what it really means is when I think about our customers and how we want to show up in all of the communities where we live and work and operate around the world, everybody wants clean water, clean air, and access to connection with people in their communities.

We want to be able to thrive. And so all of the things that we work on are really about enabling that, and particularly putting all of the things that we have at Amazon on the scale that we have, the resources that we have, and the superpowers that we have into action around those things. So our teams work on things like how we protect natural resources, how we utilize and empower more clean energy, how we think about water in those communities. But also importantly, how we might help to address a natural disaster with our logistics capabilities, how we might, for example, deliver food to communities who need it. So sustainability can mean many different things underneath that, but it's really about protecting people and the planet everywhere where we live and work and operate.

Dan Bova (2:59)

So before we get into all the details of all that, I'm just curious, what drew you to this? What made you want to be a Chief Sustainability Officer?

Kara Hurst (3:12)

Yeah, it's a windy road for, I think, a lot of us in these types of positions.

I've worked in a lot of different fields, including politics. I spent a lot of time in nonprofits and thinking about how communities interact with companies and really had the opportunity when I came to Amazon to think about how do I build and put all of these resources to scale. So sustainability for me, I'm a systems thinker, and it's a perfect place to land because what you get to do is to think across all of, not only all of the different industries that we operate in at Amazon, but you really get to think what I call to be multilingual. So we have to work with the public sector, governments, governmental institutions, multilaterals, places like the UN. You've got to work with the nonprofit sector and all of our different partners, the NGOs that work in environmental issues or human rights issues. And then we work certainly with the private sector and all of our different corporate partners and all of the industries and businesses that we work with. So I love that kind of systems thinking and how you partner across those different domains, and you bring those different partners together to think about how to solve society's biggest issues, whether that is climate change or how we provide clean water or think about how, you know, to protect human rights for people. So that systems thinking for me, I love the biggest, most complex problems, and there's no better place to work on those than the company I'm at right now.

Dan Bova (4:46)

That's certainly a superpower, because not many people can speak, you know, the five different languages that you just named there. So that's pretty amazing. So, you know, it's hard to argue why people would want clean water or, you know, clean air. But for entrepreneurs listening, what's a compelling business case for sustainability? Like, how this can actually help their bottom line?

Kara Hurst (5:13)

Yeah, I think that's a great question, because a lot of entrepreneurs that I've worked with over the years, or, you know, if you think about all of the small businesses, the majority of what we sell on Amazon is small, medium-sized enterprises selling on our retail site.